Re: HDOff for NetBSD

[Bernd Sieker <bsieker%freenet.de@localhost>]

On 21.10.00, 21:24:26, Petri Koistinen wrote:
> Hi!
> 
> There is a nice tool for AmigaOS at aminet called HDOff. It will turn
> harddrive motor off after specified time. Similar tool on NetBSD would
> be quite nice too.

For IDE-disks there is atactl, which can do that and other things. See
its manpage for details. I'm not sure if it works with Amiga's IDE
drives, but it works nicely on my (i386) notebook.

> 
> Ofcource this should be done automatically, for exsample if there isn´t disk
> activity in say 60 minutes, harddisk could be turned off. And turn on when
> there is a need to access disk. This could mean that if data is in memory
> harddrive would not need to be running, althought CPU is doing something.

atactl can do this. But be sure to also remount the filesystems with
"-o noatime,nodevmtime", otherwise there will be frequent accesses to
the disk and it will spin up again.

> 
> Unfortunately HDOff does not come with source code and I have no
> idea how to put this idea in kernel. What I know is that turning on/off motor
> can be simply done via normal IDE-cable by sending message to harddrive.
> 
> So what do you think about the idea?
> 
> Regards
> Petri Koistinen
> 
> 

-- 
Bernd Sieker

NetBSD:  Got source?